A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information retrieval systems and, more particularly, to a system and method for supporting editorial opinion in the ranking of search results.
B. Description of Related Art
The Internet has become an increasingly important part of our everyday lives.
Millions of people now access the Internet on a daily basis to shop for goods and services, obtain information of interest (e.g., movie listings), and to communicate with friends, family, and co-workers (e.g., via e-mail).
Currently, when a person wishes to purchase a product or simply find information on the Internet, the person enters into his/her web browser a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) pertaining to a web site of interest in order to access that particular web site. The person then determines whether the information of interest is available at that particular web site.
For example, suppose a consumer wishes to purchase a printer via the Internet. The consumer accesses the Internet and types in a vendor's URL. The consumer is then able to access that vendor's home page to determine whether the vendor has the product that the consumer wishes to purchase.
If the consumer is not aware which vendors sell printers, the consumer may access a conventional search engine. The consumer enters the generic term “printer” into the search engine to attempt to locate a vendor that sells printers. Using a commercial search engine in this manner to locate individual web sites that offer the desired product or service often results in hundreds or even thousands of “hits” (i.e., web pages that relate to the search term).
The consumer must then decide which particular web pages to visit. Viewing each web page to determine whether the particular web site offers the desired product is a time consuming process. As a result, a current trend in the area of search services involves providing a ranked list of web pages in response to the search query. To generate such a list, the services may match terms in the query against the partial or full text of documents in its database or use historical information regarding which web pages were viewed in response to certain queries, etc.
Other search services have attempted to improve Internet searching by compiling static lists of web pages on specific topics. Directory listings, such as Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) and Open Directory (www.dmoz.org), are examples. These services map a search query against the editorial comments accompanying each web page that was reviewed by an editor of the service, and optionally the full text of the documents, to generate a list of results. The scope of these services is limited, however, to the set of pages that has been reviewed by the search services' editors.
AskJeeves (www.ask.com) generalizes the application of editorial opinion to a collection of pages. Their editors identify a set of pages that share a common theme (e.g., home pages of airports) and associate this set of pages with specific trigger words (e.g., the word “airport”). When one of the trigger words appears in the query, they present the user with a concise representation of the associated set of pages, allowing the user to choose one. Again, the scope of this technique is restricted to the set of pages that were reviewed by the editors, which tends to be many orders of magnitude smaller than the set of useful pages on the World Wide Web.
Therefore, there exists a need for a system and method that improve Internet searching.